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Faizel Patel – 24/11/2020
As the world continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, a South African scientist has made a world first technological breakthrough developing a facial recognition technology prototype, able to recognise human faces through face masks.
The Coronavirus did not only force the world to change their hygienic habits, but also negatively impacted on distinguishing between friend and foe.
The main reason for this struggle is the fact that our faces are obscured by the compulsory face masks
Speaking to Radio Islam, scientist, Ishmael Msiza who developed the facial recognition technology says the prototype focusses on the facial landmarks that are left exposed by the facemask.
“A conventional facial recognition system focuses on the entire face. We have now to build a system that only focuses on even less than half of the facial landmarks exposed. We had to come up with a unique blend of conventional image processing techniques and artificial intelligence (AI) which is one of the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR).
Msiza says the rollout of the technology depends on preparedness of technology companies to manufacture this new system.
“We started working on this technology sometime around May/June. Before we started, we engaged with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) like Suprema from South Korea. They actually expressed a lot of interest.”
A recent report published by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) states that algorithm accuracy with masked faces has declined substantially across the board.
This implies that the world is currently on a desperate search for more robust and innovative facial recognition algorithms.
Listen to the interview with Ishmael Msiza
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